1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to an improved data processing system and in particular to an improved method for storing and accessing data files on a data processing system. Still more particularly, embodiments of the present invention relate to a method, apparatus and program product for efficiently storing and accessing data files utilizing inodes.
2. Description of the Related Art
File systems, such as the general parallel file system (GPFS), are utilized for storing and subsequently retrieving electronic data files on a computer system or storage device. These file systems typically utilize a data structure referred to as an inode to provide information related to the location of a corresponding file (within the general storage space) and the attributes and other data related to the stored file. In order to provide easier management of files that are related to a single project, some file systems provide the abstraction of filesets, which are disjoint subtrees of a file system that can be managed separately from each other. One problem with the current fileset implementations is that most data management operations, including snapshots, backups, replication, and information life cycle management (ILM) policy, become much more expensive (with respect to processing resource usage and latency) when applied to individual filesets one-at-a-time, compared to a single operation applied to the file system as a whole. As the conventional implementation of inodes does not provide knowledge about which inode blocks may contain inodes for a particular fileset, a management operation on a single fileset must still read all of the inode blocks of the entire filesytem, and will therefore be just as expensive as applying the same operation to the file system as a whole.